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Axis forces There is a general agreement that liberalism’s highly conflicted ideological axes present as left ↔ right and something along the lines of “Get your fucking hands off me” ↔ “That’s enough, you little squirt - we know what is best for you”. It is a good thing to have some idea, at least, of the general form and substance of the system in whose mighty span all the current political possibilities of the world are contained, and in whose rangy vistas one’s own little intellectual horizons are folded. At least, if one is a liberal. Or a Marxist, or a standard issue conservative. But we are not liberals or Marxists or conservatives. We are nationalists. Our politics do not map anywhere on the liberal axes. The tension which exists between genuine nationalism and any aspect of liberal politics clearly attests to that fact. One has only to look at how left and right, ordinarily enemies in a permanent, often vicious trench war, throw over all disagreements to vote for the surviving non-nationalist candidate whenever nationalism threatens to achieve an electoral advance. But what, exactly, is the form and substance of this outright opponent of the liberal Weltanschauung? You would think that, as its ardent advocates, we would all know the answer to this very obvious question. You would think that the salient extremes of a politics of natural interests, and so of life itself, must be screamingly obvious. Not so. Most of us probably don’t think of nationalism as a self-contained system of thought at all. Most of us probably suppose, in a received-wisdom sort of way, that it arises from within the liberal canon as an historical corrective or digression. Opinions to be found in the British mainstream media comment threads certainly support that thesis. I lost patience long ago with the endless supply of mortally embarrassed nationalist thread-folk who, confronted with the too too awful accusation that Hitler was “right-wing”, fly at their accusers with the information that oh no, he was “left-wing”. The clue is in the word “socialist”, you see. Oh no it isn’t. Oh yes it is. Oh no … oh yes … oh no. Oh well. MR has some previous on this nationalist axiality question. The best part of a decade ago James Bowery, Mike Rienzi and I were playing around with the notion of determining the philosophical basics and designing the software for a nationalist political compass. Looking back, it is striking how Mike, an impetuous soul, was interested in a quick and achievable binning system whereby test-takers could be assigned to one or other ideological focal point. There was, I recall, already a somewhat crude system out there which aimed at this. Mike thought we would easily do better. I didn’t see the advantage, though. Do we not know our own ideological focus? Unless the system could present the test-taker with a real and instructive sense of scale and relation, what was the point? The problem for me, then, was (and is) one of determining the mysterious and elusive dynamics of nationalist philosophy. For his part, James seemed more interested in optimising the software and smashing the competing technology out of the park. He wasn’t interested in Mike’s doable but all too linear binning idea. He wasn’t interested in a cruciform system stretched over a single plane, of the kind employed by the Political Compass. No, James had it in his head that a three-dimensional space centred, obviously, on three intersectional axes, would afford the ultimate user experience, like standing in a planetarium. Whether or not nationalist thought could be rationalised in a tri-axial form seemed incidental. But before we think more fully about the number and kind of potential axes in nationalism we should clear away all influences from the ideological world with which we are familiar, and into which we are inevitably thrown, which is the Western liberal model - the cruciform of social and economic ideologies. The folks who theorised the good old Political Compass somewhat thoughtlessly assumed a bisection central to both left ↔ right and libertarian ↔ authoritarian axes, so that they all stretch away for equal distances. Well, symmetry is invitingly neat and tidy. But no such central point of absolute moderation in all things exists. Consideration of what is central immediately draws us into the shifting nature of orthodoxy and makes us hostage to political subjectivity. The whole exercise fails accordingly, and its findings are reduced to a rude parody, thus:
Well, I’m sorry but the digital age verity of “rubbish in, rubbish out” applies. As nationalists … that is, as ideological actors who resile from liberalism’s Cartesian confection of the unfettered will and turn towards the vivifying and authentic … we cannot be remotely satisfied with that. And the discontent runs deep. The idea – taken as fact by familiarity or pure faith - that left means collectivism and right means individualism is quite without merit for nationalists. In the liberal canon collectivism is as much a means to individual freedom as individualism itself, the masses becoming – most often by the force of the state or the party - agents of their own supposed class-conscious will to a negative freedom. In practise the liberal freedom of the masses and the liberal freedom of the individual never quite reconcile, because the availability to the individual of positive as well as negative freedoms opens the way to differentials and exploitation. The real difference here, though, is the melancholy fact that folks with “working-class” antecedents and an IQ under, say, 115 just can’t do the struggle for positive freedom. It has to be class-conflict (implying class solidarity, aka the lumpen proletariat) and party organisation for them. But nationalism simply does not run down those ideological lines. The working-class and all the rest of the socialistically class-ified folk do not configure as conflicted units. The people’s natural coherence is the first and most fundamental claim of nationalism. If there is no conflicted political actor which is a social class neither is there a conflicted political actor which is the individual, for the individual in nationalism is not a confected identity striving endlessly for some personal affirmation of his own particular, earth-shaking, “right-wing” agency and import. Rather, the truth of him and of all who are kin to him is the same … the same as itself with itself, to crib from the Heidegerrian formulation for identity, or of itself in a more “MR” formulation. To combine them, every identity coheres with, and only with, every other identity which is of that identity. (Btw, comparison of Heidegger’s formulation to ours might begin by comparing and contrasting consciousness of being to consciousness of kin and kind – they are in relation to one another, and the relation is that of condionality in a universe in which being is anterior to and, indeed, is the function of identity.) But to continue ... If the left ↔ right axis crashes and burns in contact with identitarian thinking – and it does - the fate of the libertarian ↔ authoritarian divide is scarcely happier. As a first step, nationalism’s fidelity to foundation transforms and naturalises the autonomous individual’s unfettering will into the turn to authenticity … to a self which expresses emergent natural properties. But its second step is to infuse the folk accordingly, producing by default a conservative, self-sustaining politics of genetic interests. Meanwhile, at the other end of the axis the ruler’s claim to authority over the struggle to shape the future Man is also transformed, this time into a politics of genetic interests which are aggressive in tone, and usually prescribe heroism in the quest for ethnic conquest, acquisition, aggrandisement, and supremacy. In this way the weedy liberal social axis, which John Ray once told me is the only definite political dynamic for which cognitive psychologists have been able to find evidence, is replaced by a more fundamental axis of ethnic genetic interest. So … the nationalist cruciform becomes clearer. One axis is metaphysical. I would suggest that it constitutes as being, realism ↔ becoming, idealism. The other is bio-political, to use Mike Rienzi’s term, and would seem to be expressible as folk preservation or conservation or maintenance ↔ expansion and conquest, empire-building. It is reasonable to assume that the bisection point would seek to combine a perhaps nascent awareness of self with adaptive choice-making. If, for some reason, one rejected the bio-political in favour of the social – and I don’t think that is an optimal strategy – the axis would likely process as conservative ↔ progressive, but don’t ask me yet how one would even approach the refinement of a suitable point of bisection with the other axis. Is there a Bowreyesque third axis running through the cruciform, and conditioning it to another set of political determinants? There are certainly possibilities that might reward reflection. Psychology, for example. So maybe consciousness, which has the polar opposite in mechanicity, and which could, as an alternative, be profitably and tellingly presented as presence ↔ absence. Or there is freedom, which could offer interesting axial possibilities, though nationalism’s freedom in being is less straightforward to polarise than liberalism’s grand obsession with fetters! As ever, and as you see, the whole subject is a work in progress and something of an intellectual self-indulgence … a philosophical game of detection. But it is the work of knowing our own philosophy, our own politics, and our own ethnic self, and every one of us would do well to reflect on that. You never know, we might even get a magnificently capacious and authoritative three-dimensional political compass out of it yet. But not, I think, without Bowery. Comments:2
Posted by DanielS on Tue, 22 Nov 2016 06:46 | # Hence - While you have some very good contributions to make on a content level, your meta-frame (and Bowery’s) is completely off the mark. The title’s dog whistle to your hoped for audience and nostalgia for the Nazi way provides a clue. You want to return to Hitler’s sub-praxis, i.e., leaning in sub human and sub social direction (Hitler WAS a right-winger who gained popular assent through left cover), a world more reliably deterministic, more “scientific”, less “merely social” ...not so “messy, no no no ..has to work just like the car engine you fix or the computer Bowery attends to” (as Millennial Woes has lamely followed you to describe detractors as “merely social”). But just because there may be fewer contradictions in a homogeneous, ethnonationalist society, then, does not mean that there would be no potential contradictions. You are blind for whatever personal and generational fortune that allows you to think that Thatcherism/Austrian school is wonderful ....that emergentism requires no social feedback or would somehow necessarily be hurt by social accountability… because, you insist that social accountability is what the Jews say that it is…..and you play into their hands, now a near causative matter of physics ....“expansion and conquest, empire-building.” ...against the whimpering “left.” But just as the idiotic Richard Spencer, the likes of Colin Liddell and Matt Forney really believe that they have made this thing, “The Alternative Right” with its “anti-leftism” its Trump, they have not, inasmuch, rather, they are making of themselves controlled opposition and controlled reaction. 3
Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 22 Nov 2016 07:50 | # Daniel, I have repeatedly said that I will not put on these pages argumentation which must, by its nature, drive you away. I will not do that. I will not decimate your historiographical position, though heaven knows your recourse to it, like a mechanical trap, is proving trying. Instead, I urge you to consider the creative force of altruism in the European mind ... the desire for brotherhood and unity ... the desire which often lurks within that for personal recognition and validation ... the propensity for universalism, Christian and post-Christian ... the propensity for envy ... the will to over-turn, which is the lot of the second son ... the idealism of a better world, and how these rather ordinary and occasionally fine things energise and direct what everyone in this world but you calls the left - and do so quite independently of contemporaneous Jewish manipulations. Don’t be such a scold about this. Make your definitions more elastic, at least in their philosophical derivations, so that you are not driving yourself into completely unnecessary conflicts with me - conflicts which you will not lose, because I will not set out to beat you, but which will, over time, do harm to the common apprehension of your character. I guess that the deep problem with your adherence to a special marking out of the left of the liberal axis ... that’s liberal in the systemic sense ... is that you have parsed the problem of European/Jewish derivations in the Western canon from 1851, but not from 313. 4
Posted by DanielS on Tue, 22 Nov 2016 11:24 | #
I have explained this many times. And contrary to your false attribution that nobody understands this but me, intelligent people, particularly those who are already coming from a leftist perspective understand this - its just that they haven’t applied it to White interests - instead Whites either go into Stockholm syndrome identification with the liberalism it implies for Whites (unionized interests against White interest are liberalism for us) or react, as you do, have here, yet again, to its distortions and applications against White interests. The Jews want Whites to identify with that rightist reaction and, courtesy Gottfiried and Spencer, the Alt Right is buying into (I’m afraid, so are you). They then take and steer that reaction. By contrast a Left is a sufficiently accountable, agentive and compassionate unionization of interests. When it is a Left Nationalism the class overlaps the nation. It doesn’t deny facts and if people function in accordance with the national “union” wonderful, but it does not hope and wish that they will merely according to objective fall out - that the invisible hand will be applied to border control, as it were. So that differing abilities are not wallpapered-over, what was once, e.g., an Aristocratic class difference that “liberals” and “leftists” would argue against in order to shatter, instead becomes another union in the national union, not impervious, either to accountability or possible entry given merit, not at odds with the rest of the class, the national union. Kumiko has a very important article coming up. The article that you bumped down (a transcript of Greg Johnson’s history of The Alt Right) is meant to proceed it, so when she gets to post that, I need to move it up again.
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Posted by James Bowery on Tue, 22 Nov 2016 16:58 | # I’m starting to see how Heidegger’s “as structure” may be a key concept in translating my proposed “third dimension” into something more comprehensible. Let me illustrate by recasting my 2007 article “Why “The Political Compass” Is Inherently Vectorist and How to Correct It”. In that article I started with an example of a “vectorist” (a neologism, along with “heterosity” I was exploring at the time) “political compass” statement: “I oppose homosexual behavior.” I broke that down, in my “third dimension” into “I prefer homosexual relations.” “Homosexuality should be allowed within my nation.” “I would tolerate the existence of a nation, somewhere in the world, that allowed homosexuality.”, with metrics “Strongly disagree”, “Disagree” and “Agree”. I would now recast that breakdown into: “As an individual I oppose homosexual behavior.” “As head of my household I oppose homosexual behavior.” “As a member of the human race I oppose homsexual behavior.” The ordinal seductiveness is obvious as this represents a social scale. However, it becomes more problematic when one includes a statement like, “As a Southern Baptist I oppose homosexual behavior.” This exposes identity interpreted within Heidegger’s “as” and this identity does seem to have some ordinal characteristics but when we notice the manifold structure of identity, the ordinal structure dissipates. It is not a single dimension any more than is identity a single dimension. I’ve been reviewing a not-yet-published book on Western philosophy written from the standpoint of George Spencer Brown’s “Laws of Form” as interpretive guide to the earliest conflicts in Greek philosophy between Pythagorean mysticism and its rejection by what might be called Aristotelian objectivism. This gets to the central issue of the ontology project and, indeed, to a central pathology that has beset Western philosophy of science quite possibly since Aristotle, and which keeps cropping up in variegated forms: “modernism”, “cartesianism”, “individualism” (the deracinated “individual” I am, frustratingly, smeared with at MR—promulgated by “objectivists”, Locke and so forth), etc. But these Enlightenment pathologies are only the most recent incarnations. The formalization of “logic” in predication (subject, predicate, object triplets), taken as a given ever since Aristotle, has, within it, the recurrent “paradox” of making “logical” sense of the world: Russell’s paradox, Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, etc. This is a work in progress and much of it is inchoate so I can’t really be bothered to respond to misinterpretations, attacks and smears here at MR. For what it is worth, here is a communication I sent to the author of the book regarding “bodies” and my, admittedly largely inchoate, attempt to make Hobbes’s Leviathan commensurable with identity politics, including the individual identity. My progress is slow because I’ve been going back over Part 1 a few times. It is a _great_ introductory overview of the history of Western philosophy and that is an area of my education that has been quite lacking. It puts a lot of words, concepts, etc. into perspective that I have been hearing all my life but never been able to integrate into a coherent structure. I didn’t see, yet, any mention of the relation between sovereignty and interiorization. This, it seems to me, is central to the relation between society and individuation. These relations are also key to understanding the relation between communication as predication and perception as mysticism. To the extent that a sovereignties interiorize individuals, the resulting societies are decreasingly reliant on communication between individuals and increasingly reliant on what I guess might be called “social mysticism”. The direct relation of the individual is no longer to the universe at large, including other individuals, but to the body politic as a whole of which the erstwhile individual is now an interior part. When one is dealing with theocratic devolution, as with Luther, one is reducing social mysticism and, ultimately, exteriorizing individuals. This requires a greater emphasis on communication as predication—hence the social aspect of “science” demands predication to dispel theocracy’s “social mysticism”. In the past, I’ve described this as “the authority of experiment over argument” but given your book I see that another phrase needs to be contrasted with that: “the authority of experience over theory”. The words “experiment” and “experience” share the prefix “experi-” but they are distinguished, at least in my untutored connotations, with communication and perception respectively. The independent replication of experiment is central to the scientific method and there can be no “independence”, in that sense, without communication. Other individuals are commanded to perform certain operations. These require operational definitions of words. Operations are degenerate predicates as they are injunctions. As with all injunctions, such as: “Bring 1 liter of water to a boil.” the implied subject, object, predicate triple is “You, the investigator, bring 1 liter of water to a boil.” A more complete predicate would be: “I, the discoverer, command you, the skeptic, to bring 1 liter of water to a boil.” Interestingly, when viewed in this final manner, the discoverer is a temporary “sovereign” over his temporary “subject”, the skeptic who is doing as commanded. This kind of _temporary_ interiorizing is the host/guest relationship which is purely voluntary and, in that respect, may be thought of as a new way to view “consent of the governed”. 6
Posted by Technology facilitated Luther's Reformation on Wed, 23 Nov 2016 16:01 | #
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Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 23 Nov 2016 19:59 | # James, I will need you to explicate your thinking on “as”. I hope it isn’t too subtly syllogistic - I entirely lack the requisite training for that kind of challenge. In questions of identity and relation, sets seems OK to me, if one must be so reductive; and that’s my limit. Reading Rota on “dependency” and “contents” I am reminded of the utility of the tri-partite interpretation of Mind structure which I have tried to champion here, and which, operationally, explicates cognition holistically as thought associations underpinned by emotional value underpinned by biological imperatives (the underpinning being effected by differentials in processing speed ... thought is lumbering, emotion is quickfire, the calculations of the mind-body are light-speed). The point here being that, yes, an individual thought is lost to the passing moment, as Rota states. There is nothing, no foundational attachment, to anchor it in existence. Even the memory of it does not “presentify” it, to quote from Rota’s subsequent argumentation on identity, because thought, being associative in kind, is relational and memory does not re-construct the multiplicity of relations. Even in memory, therefore, the thought is eviscerated. To be more precise, thinking - say, on a text - is an endless train of short processes structured as trigger-initialisation and subsequent association. The product of any one train has no existence more permanent than its own process-life. Nor has the train as such any permanent focus or character. But the functioning determinant of emotional value ... “the good”, “the bad”, etc ... is always there in the background colouring the passage through life, so to speak, and providing an impressively constant but still subjectively open point of reference; while “the necessary” in the simple imperatives of the body are truly permanent, universal, and unassailable. What “exists” as the foundation on which thought-models are ultimately dependent is this structure of cognition. So yes, any single thought (about, say, the content of a text) disappears. Re-thinking will produce variations in thought just from the ever-expanding universe of associations available in the thinking faculty. But the whole structure biases for a generally stable outcome over time because, ultimately, Nature requires us to operate at all times as beings with a life-interest sufficient to generate a collective subsistence in the face of Time and Entropy. I also think it is important to make a distinction between “presentifying” in Rota’s crushingly conventional and dull, hardly necessary sense of an apparent objecthood, and presence in the sense of the ontological transit: the journey out of the universal condition of ordinary waking consciousness towards an optimum basis for making adaptive choices in an essentialised and real world: essentialised and real because this is how Mind is truly evolved to be (ie, the ordinary conscious state we experience is not the same as the normal conscious state. This latter is where mysticism withdraws and reason returns - but, always, of course, in the holistic, essential mode of thinking.) Also, you write, “To the extent that sovereignties interiorize individuals ...” But in my simple Weltanschauung, and assuming that interiorization here means the process of subject and object appearing together in the perception, ie, of the subject not becoming immersed in the object, which is what really happens 24/7 in ordinary waking consciousness ... that is our true state of absence ... assuming that, the order is the wrong way around, I would say. What I have called “the turn” is sovereignising. Sovereignty is not a given, but the property of what appropriates in the turn. 8
Posted by James Bowery on Wed, 30 Nov 2016 22:15 | # Interiorize: transitive verb. : to make interior; especially : to make a part of one’s own inner being or mental structure. Understood in this sense, the phrase “To the extent that sovereignties interiorize individuals ...” refers to the extent to which a “sovereignty”, makes an individual part of its inner being or mental structure. The individual ceases to be an object to the sovereignty and becomes a subject—part of the sovereignty’s interior life as a whole. If I may offer a further notion of “object” in this regard: Objects are those aspects of appearance that are invariant with change of perspective, or, more generally, “Weltanschauung” in its general sense of “a particular philosophy or view of life; the worldview of an individual or group.” The group may have a particular worldview and it may change with time, just as may a particular individual’s. From those changes in its worldview emerge invariants both in its worldview (predispositions, paradigms, narratives, myths, prior probability distributions, etc.) and in the things that appear to it as objects. An “identity” is, then, a boundary distinguishing subject and object: between subject—not perceived as “existing”, and object as existing or exterior. This boundary may change with time and, to that extent, so does the “identity” considered as an “object”. Speaking of the “authentic individual” as opposed to his travesty as “the autonomous unfettered will of the individual” it is true that a people united by consanguinity and congeniality will embody a Weltanschauung—an identity—within which the individual finds his greatest self-authorship—his most authentic expression in every sense including phenotypic expression as distinct from extended phenotypic. It is the mythic challenge of Man to recognize his essential choice is to say “yes” to that which gave him Being. Denial of this choice is not a denial of Nature and Nature’s God, so to speak, but rather simply a denial of Man’s Being. There are worse things afoot than denial of Man’s Being—as we see ourselves surrounded by the extended phenotypes of Jews turning erstwhile Men into zombies. These “creatures” aren’t even animals. 9
Posted by James Bowery on Tue, 28 Mar 2017 00:01 | # Quoting from “Radical Constructivism in Action: Building on the Pioneering Work of Ernst Glasersfeld” edited by Leslie P. Steffe, Patrick W. Thompson:
von Glaserfeld’s “radical constructivism”, originating in the mid 1970s, followed hot on the heels of Heinz von Foerster’s “second order cybernetics” (on which he had been writing and teaching for a decade by the mid 1970s) and seems to have enjoyed a good deal more academic “legitimacy”, even though the paper “Radical Constructivism and Second order Cybernetics” by R Glanville makes the case that they are “opposite sides of the same coin”. It’s interesting that I met Heinz and first heard about second order cybernetics from him the same year both he and von Glaserfeld published their respective books on these “two sides”. I had been hired by a colleague of his and who was also a colleague of von Glaserfeld, Stuart Umpleby to work on the PLATO Communications Project. PLATO was to be a computer based education system and von Glaserfeld’s focus in radical constructivism, along with Piaget, was on education. So far as I could see, neither “side” had much impact on the evolution of the PLATO project’s educational mission. I bring this up because finding a Rosetta Stone between Heidegger’s phenomenology—at least its interpretation in The Ontology Project here at MR—and my own background has been a tantalizingly unrealized potential.
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Posted by DanielS on Tue, 28 Mar 2017 06:28 | # von Glasersfeld is a joke. He came to a conference at my university back in the nineties, we talked with him and that confirmed it. Trying to integrate von Glasersfeld’s notion of cybernetics with the human condition: Brought to you by the people so irresponsible as to say in the face of all resource that I have brought to bear that I’ve “failed utterly” (shame on whomever would say that and whatever their petty motivation), and that all resources that I’ve brought to bear boil down to one thing - now “the left” the problem, then “sociology and ‘ad hoc’ group unit of analysis” the problem, and another time, its attention to “agency” supposedly all what I’m saying boils down to, etc. ..never mind, so long as a myriad of ideas boil down to one problem in the STEM mind in its pursuit to locate mechanistic causality and circuitry. But their hyper competitiveness, desperation really, to make themselves and their STEM predilections the only matter and all else redundant only reveals their epistemological blunder; and, I would say, it exposes their philosophical immaturity, but it is rather an utter amateurishness and puerile, misplaced competitiveness to have created this false either/or in the first place. “A more clear and scientific description of what “IS” ad infinitum is THE means to revolution.” Most of us have our calming and quantifying diversions - but as mature people we call them hobbies and diversions from the stress of the real hurley burley. We may larp in these fantasy diversions, we may even come up with some good ideas incidentally in these states, but we don’t pretend that makes redundant and irrelevant the true work of those who are actually attending to reality and applying advanced conceptual tools which don’t fit into a puerile fantasy larp of shield maidens and sovereigns.
“Being Of” - fine, that may well be the perspective to most often manifest authentic emergence - but clearly not always. There-being will be necessary to engage hermeneutic process and take oneself out of Cartesian rigidity; and being amidst one’s folk, midtdasein, would be a necessary turn toward authenticity, and away from Cartesian absence and rigidity as well on the hermeneutic tour in its assimilation of organic process. Socialization - for humans, absolutely unavoidable: the implementation of rules which are conducive to stabilization and being (rules which GW focuses on) on the one hand and those which stress and challenge it to advance on another. Socialization understood in its authentic form as midtdasein. Routine/ and the Sacral practice - both routine and the sacral episode are meant to stabilize gains from previous generations learning - reconstructions and enactments of what is crucial to homeostasis of being and the social system. Actualization - as Aristotle meant it, the realization, the full maturation, the teleological end to which an organism is born. That end may be conducive to stabilization, to homeostasis of the social system (its being of beings) or it may instigate rupture or revolution. America and those people it has influenced have put a premium on its individual expression and actualization thereof to the utter disregard of impact on prerequisite being, socialization, routine and sacrament; to the damage myopic focus on this quest has done to the homeostasis of racial/ethnic systems; and how our racial enemies have used pop versions of this language game to divert us from group defense and basic level concerns - every bit as important as actualization and not wholly contained by pursuit of actualization: being, socialization, routine/sacral And no, these four topoi are not all that I bring to bear, and not all of what I bring that requires development. 11
Posted by Kumiko Oumae on Tue, 28 Mar 2017 09:40 | # Ernst von Glasersfeld seems like he is actually okay though, as he may be the root of the whole ‘cultural turn’ and the development of constructivist and postmodern thought as we know it. The only thing that is – in my view – lacking from Glasersfeld’s thought which is extremely important to me, is that his radical constructivism is on an ideological level something that would be understood like, “New Liberalism, Ernst von Glasersfeld Thought”. Why liberalism? Because Glasersfeld Thought – although very sensible – is a product of the liberal world (and I say this as simply a fact, not as a denigration of it), and it does not explain how there can be comparisons between different social formations and as such some people might say that Glasersfeld is ‘self-refuting’. If what is regarded as ‘true’ in one social formation is possibly ‘false’ in another social formation, as Glasersfeld says, then that same assessment might also be applied to radical constructivism itself. It may be possible to say that in previous modes of production and social formations, constructivism was ‘false’ because it was not yet useful to the dominant class to have acknowledged it or even discovered it. In the present, it is ‘true’ because it is known to be useful to the dominant class. And it may yet be superseded and rendered ‘false’ once again in a hypothetical case where it no longer becomes useful to the dominant class (whoever they might be) in a future social formation that is ‘higher’ on the spiral of progress, although I don’t think it is likely that this would happen. My question would be how then, if we believe the above, do we maintain an absolutely materialist view of the situation without falling into pure relativism and idealism? The answer arrives when sternly asking one question about the word ‘useful’. What is the common denominator that allows us to translate between the different social formations using a common understanding? The answer: Economics (literally: national housekeeping). Productive forces, class analysis, and additionally ethnic genetic interests as elements in the relations of production. If you look at it like that, then it is possible for Glasersfeld to be in fact always correct about all historic blocs/social formations/modes of production, but not capable of being correct in every one of them. However, in the process of thinking like that, you will have freed Glasersfeld from the confines of liberal history and transformed all of his thought into an expansion pack on historical materialism. If this sounds strange, conduct this thought experiment. Every time Glasersfeld talks about ‘usefulness’ in the context of ‘science’, insert the line, “and science is spurred forward by the desire of the dominant class to solve the tasks it has been confronted with though innovation – which is to say, economic development.” Once you realise what you’ve just done, you will also see that clearly this way of looking at the world had to be discovered, which is why people keep pointing toward the same thing even when they are not explicitly intending to do so, because all of the loose ends left hanging by diverse philosophers all seem to be only capable of being tied off in this single way. ‘Truth’ for Glasersfeld is ‘that which is useful’. Q: Useful for what? すばらしい！
In the previous social formation the answer to the question would’ve been ‘control of arable land’. And the culture was constructed differently back then, because of that. You could basically say that the social sciences, particularly social constructionism, are about trying to explain the ‘why’ behind developments that take place in STEM fields as well as describing the dialectical relationship between STEM innovations and changes in human social organisation. And the social sciences are not separate from that process, but rather, are part of that human social organisation themselves. 12
Posted by DanielS on Tue, 28 Mar 2017 10:59 | # Kumiko, I’ll read your comment carefully in a moment. First I want to provide some background. People who think like von Glasersfeld are trying to play catch up ...realizing that somehow they’ve got to come to terms with interaction and communicology…. and praxis…though they still can’t come to terms with the latter. Failing that is a large part of why von Glasersfeld is lame. He tries to develop a pure cybernetic model of human interaction. ...a kind of behaviorism wherein people go around perturbing one another and react to those perturbations. He goes to the behavioral end and as I’ve said, that’s Cartesian too. Cybernetics has some relevance to human praxis but not to the extent that von Glasersfeld theorizes. He’s still at a point called social constructIVISM which concentrates on the products of construction not the process of construction. 13
Posted by Captainchaos on Tue, 28 Mar 2017 18:26 | # National Socialism has a proven track record of success, unlike the intellectual masturbation of spergs of all stripes. 14
Posted by James Bowery on Tue, 28 Mar 2017 20:17 | # My posts on a Rosetta Stone for the Ontology Project are not understood—in content nor intent. This isn’t surprising given the absence of said Rosetta Stone. Seeking common language and clear meaning is hard work—and quite thankless until accomplished. A good example of such hard work is Shane Legg in this video lecture on the definition of “intelligence”. To the extent that I’m be classified as a “STEM” “Cartesian”, I would point out that this is rather like characterizing Pythagoreans as “nerds”. 15
Posted by DanielS on Tue, 28 Mar 2017 21:05 | #
No it isn’t. There is a tendency in STEM types to adopt a more rigid and mechanistic notion of necessity as a result of the problems they are habituated to attend to and solve; and to not take Artistotle’s advice that in the human social world of praxis, necessity is more subtle and complicated - in a word it requires a different notion of necessity. Of course science is indispensable (as distinguished from bad science and its misapplication, which is “scientism”); it gave us the deep insights of genetics, medical technology, etc. etc. However, it is not the same as philosophy and other disciplines, which are indispensable as well, recognizing the necessity to craft a different notion of necessity for the social world, as there are different possibilities in the social world which raise ought questions, philosophical questions. I have always seen the possibility of the two ends working together; the two extremes of the hermeneutic process are not mutually exclusive and should not be treated as such. I have been surprised by those instances when ONLY the harder end is considered serious and the “softer” end dismissed as unimportant, erroneous, an “utter failure” even. That is ridiculous and irresponsible. THAT is the misreading; and it is attributable quite obviously to STEM predilection - physics envy in its worst expression. 16
Posted by James Bowery on Tue, 28 Mar 2017 21:15 | #
Yes, it is. There are two sides to the “Truth and Freedom” notion of Sortocracy: Consent and Science. When you aren’t dumbing it down to the “Truth” side alone (“scientism”/“Cartesianism”) you are making a travesty of the “Freedom” side (“radical (deracinated) individualism”). These insults are tiresome. Please leave GW and I to try to get some grounds for communication opened up. 17
Posted by DanielS on Tue, 28 Mar 2017 21:38 | #
DanielS: No it isn’t; and I don’t characterize you as “Cartesian” but STEM, yes.
DanielS: In your framework; and that’s fine if you want to promote that, but its not enough; particularly when you say things like…
DanielS: Scientim is scientism. I didn’t say you were guilty of this across the board or even usually - but you are guilty of it to the extent that you try say that hard scientific methods are the only proper method of philosophy and sociology. The Cartesian dualism dividing - or rather attempting to divide - observed from interaction and observer is a real and recognized problem; and there are real and recognized ways of dealing with it - hermeneutics for one. It has always struck me as ridiculous that you tried to forbid me from criticizing Cartesianism (along with any philosopher who knows what the fuck he’s talking about).
DanielS: No I’m not. You imagine that I am against any real freedom. And that I am against people doing science here. However, you are perhaps trying to blind yourself to the means by which relatively autonomous individualism comes about; I am neither blind to it nor against individualism; keep on hiding under your school desk from the Orwellian/Kafkaesque bogey collectivism if you will, lest we turn you into an insect because we think for a moment about groups, their systemic interrelation and defense. Really, I am just fine with indivdualism and recommend ways for its fuller expression.
DanielS: “Cartesian” and “Scientism” are not insults - they are real problems and when I speak of them I am rarely speaking of something that you are doing. This is like MacDonald’s reaction to my using the word “hermeneutics” - he insisted that it is anti-science, even though it is not; it complements and enhances scientific inquiry. You seem to think that I am attacking science and that you need to defend science against me. When GW says something like I have “failed utterly”, it is clear that my input and the truth indeed, are in need of defense.
DanielS: Nobody is stopping you, but if you are going to whip out someone like von Glasersfeld and act like you are ahead of the curve, well, in terms of communicology, I’m afraid you’ve got it backwards. 18
Posted by James Bowery on Tue, 28 Mar 2017 22:07 | # When you deny being insulting, you simply come off as dishonest. I have not critiqued your philosophical statements, understanding that I do not understand your argot—just as you do not mine. But I do understand enough to know when you are attacking me, quite without provocation. Characterizing my post as whipping “out someone like von Glasersfeld and act like you are ahead of the curve” might be forgivable if that is what I actually did. If you read the quote from the book that lauds him, and what I said a bit more closely, you’ll see I was, at best, damning von Glaserfeld with faint praise. I actually portrayed him as derivative from original work by von Foerster’s attempt to correct a deficiency in cybernetics: second order cybernetics (which is _not_ the same as cybernetics). That passage, in particular, addresses a deficiency in von Glaserfeld relevant to the ontology project by bringing in Heidegger. 19
Posted by DanielS on Tue, 28 Mar 2017 22:50 | #
DanielS: I said behaviorism is Cartesian. That was neither dishonest, false, an insult nor directed at you, but at von Glasersfeld. To identify someone as a STEM person is not an insult. When you have the nerve to say that I am “making a travesty of the “Freedom” side (“radical (deracinated) individualism”)” it is you - YOU who is being insulting and dishonestly misrepresenting what I say.
DanielS: You don’t know, as illustrated exactly in that point - I was talking about von Glasersfeld.
DanielS: I don’t need your “forgiveness.”
DanielS: I understood that. Nevertheless, when you and GW examine these things that are ancient history for me and then one or the other decides that I have contributed nothing of importance (and the only thing you can do to try to back that up is to ignore what I say or otherwise straw man me) yes it pisses me off. 20
Posted by James Bowery on Wed, 29 Mar 2017 12:39 | # DS: “a myriad of ideas boil down to one problem in the STEM mind in its pursuit to locate mechanistic causality and circuitry” 21
Posted by DanielS on Wed, 29 Mar 2017 13:11 | #
I should have said ” a myriad of ideas can have a tendency to be boiled down to one problem in the STEM mind in its pursuit to locate mechanistic causality and circuitry” It doesn’t have to be something that the STEM person stays riveted to. As Graham said, the best scientists are hermeneuticicists. That makes perfect sense. Kumiko is a STEM person, I don’t look upon that as an insult; and she does well to step outside of the STEM method for solving STEM problems when the matter is praxis. It is a characteristic tendency of STEM people to look toward a rigid notion of necessity and to isolate variables - you have done this to me a few times. If I cared to catalogue your insults of me, it would take a while - I don’t care to do that. I would be happy to move on and will do my best to not get mean where people don’t get gratuitously mean with me and my efforts. I do already acknowledge and give credit to your excellent ideas where they bear relevance. I have nothing against the scientific endeavor or STEM people. On the contrary. Of course, I fully commend them and their endeavors. There is no necessary conflict; harmonization is what heremeneutics is about. 22
Posted by Captainchaos on Wed, 29 Mar 2017 20:15 | # For Bowery it is not pussy that is the “light of my life, fire of my loins,” it is computers. Lulz 23
Posted by James Bowery on Mon, 03 Apr 2017 02:57 | # Oh noes! Captainchaos scores another one on Butt-Hurt-Bowery! 24
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 03 Apr 2017 11:05 | # James: “the phrase “To the extent that sovereignties interiorize individuals ...” refers to the extent to which a “sovereignty”, makes an individual part of its inner being or mental structure. The individual ceases to be an object to the sovereignty and becomes a subject—part of the sovereignty’s interior life as a whole.” What is “interior” may either be that which is original in Nature and true of us or that which is socially derived and not true. The former cannot be added to or subtracted from. It cannot be divided. It will express by necessity via the structure of Mind and may be increasingly cognised through consciousness if the intention and capacity exists - which is a clarifying and appropriating act. Indeed, “appropriation” is the better term than “interiorisation”, for nothing can be bought within from without, except in respect to the growth of that within us which is wholly socially derived. This latter is, in my little system, the personality. It achieves a kind of oppressive suzerainty over us by way of our lowly, ordinarily conscious estate. We accept it as “me” (and as “us”). It can be viewed as an endless flow of mechanistic psychological events from which we are, for all intents and purposes, truly absent. In terms of its sociobiological structure if not its socially-derived content, it is also a natural estate and a permanent part of us - an evolved tendency to declension, basically, which I have speculated upon several times here as arising from the spread of savanna in the African EEA, complete with homonid adaptions to the visual cortex and early intellectual function. The faith instinct might be an evolutionary corrective to the estrangements and afflictions it privileges. A true life philosophy would do a better job. But what we in the West have, systemically, is liberalism, which a certain serial commenter at Spiked, when questioned about earlier comments, described earlier today thus:
25
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 03 Apr 2017 11:52 | # James: Objects are those aspects of appearance that are invariant with change of perspective, or, more generally, “Weltanschauung” in its general sense of “a particular philosophy or view of life; the worldview of an individual or group.” The group may have a particular worldview and it may change with time, just as may a particular individual’s. From those changes in its worldview emerge invariants both in its worldview (predispositions, paradigms, narratives, myths, prior probability distributions, etc.) and in the things that appear to it as objects. I would agree with all that, I think. In a sense “real objects in the world” ... things that are “there” in an ontic sense ... are not problematic for perception. I have offered the view that, in fairly short order, neurology will deal with them much better than phenomonenology. They exist factically, after all, in the realm of the hard sciences. It is human beings and, in particular, the being of human beings which is difficult-to-impossible for science, but difficult also for the customary Cartesian model of perception because of its self-referentiality - its modus is itself the measure of its own proofs. Hence Heidegger developed the concept of Dasien, an act or state or site of witness and an ontological mechanism for the disclosing of human being. Is there a claim to objectivity here? Yes, of course; in so far as Mind is ever capable of objectively true direct cognition. And it is broadly capable, for evolution itself depends upon a preponderance of adaptive life choices over maladaptive ones. There is a bias for truth in Nature. James: An “identity” is, then, a boundary distinguishing subject and object: between subject—not perceived as “existing”, and object as existing or exterior. This boundary may change with time and, to that extent, so does the “identity” considered as an “object”. I take the view that identity is the absolute nature of a being interested in its own continuity, and effecting same. Being as subsistence, therefore, becomes the act or function of identity. Without subsistence we are back in the primordial world of the object: of a billion cellular arisings, mere sparks each of a millisecond’s duration, and none with the possibility of going on to become life. 26
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 03 Apr 2017 12:15 | # James: Speaking of the “authentic individual” as opposed to his travesty as “the autonomous unfettered will of the individual” it is true that a people united by consanguinity and congeniality will embody a Weltanschauung—an identity—within which the individual finds his greatest self-authorship—his most authentic expression in every sense including phenotypic expression as distinct from extended phenotypic. It is the mythic challenge of Man to recognize his essential choice is to say “yes” to that which gave him Being. Denial of this choice is not a denial of Nature and Nature’s God, so to speak, but rather simply a denial of Man’s Being. There are worse things afoot than denial of Man’s Being—as we see ourselves surrounded by the extended phenotypes of Jews turning erstwhile Men into zombies. These “creatures” aren’t even animals. Here we run into another little bit of difference. It’s that word self-authorship, which I see as usable only in so much as the distinction between what is true of us and what is only socially derived ... the product of Time and Place ... are conflated. The appropriating process is preceded by two stages: a detaching process for the simple reason that truth and untruth cannot abide together, and a process of affirmation which opens the way thus: ABSENCE ◄ habituality (mechanicity) ◄ immersion ◄ negation ◄ reverie ◄ sloth ◄ passive attention ◄INTENT► active attention ► stillness ►
detachment ► affirmation ► appropriation
► PRESENCE ► non-ascription of identity ► self-annihilation ► unalloyed Being If there is a “mythic” challenge to appropriate the truth of our kind in our daily existence, then it is ours - and, as absurd as it may sound, I mean ours here at this blog and anywhere else that such a struggle may be in train (although I know of nowhere). I caution against religious usage. I believe that it belongs to the struggle for the meaning of being (which was Heidegger’s struggle), while ours is the struggle for the nature of being. Ours can and must be a political and not just religious struggle. 27
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 03 Apr 2017 13:57 | # James: I bring this up because finding a Rosetta Stone between Heidegger’s phenomenology—at least its interpretation in The Ontology Project here at MR—and my own background has been a tantalizingly unrealized potential. We all come to the great questions of ontology, which are about identity and being and Nature therein, with our own intellectual baggage. Me perhaps more obviously than most, since I have the ponderous gait of the auto-didact. Perhaps the problem of mutual interpretation is irresolvable because you cleave quite naturally to the scientific and empirical and I to the speculative and propositional, which is only what you would expect from an intellectual dilettante who eschews actual research and hard facts! However, this is an origination project, not a commentary on past thinkers - even on Martin Heidegger. Yes, histories are particular. But it should be possible to move towards commonality if we both know where we are headed. 28
Posted by James Bowery on Mon, 03 Apr 2017 16:28 | # Utilizing the small bit of the common language here: Empirical is to external as mystical is to internal. My seeming focus on “the empirical” is balanced by an unacknowledged focus on “the mystical” as reflected in my prior statement: “the earliest conflicts in Greek philosophy between Pythagorean mysticism and its rejection by what might be called Aristotelian objectivism” The supposed conflict between “modernity”, “liberalism” etc. and the authentic has much deeper roots in Western Civilization than the ersatz “philosophy” of “individualism” of the past few centuries. It goes back before even the Roman Empire—which is why I never get a satisfactory answer from those obsessed with smearing me with Enlightenment idiots like Locke et al even after I point to the Roman Empire as suffering from the diseases of “modernity”. This goes straight to the heart of my proposal for “Sortocracy” as “Sorting proponents of social theories into governments that test them.” We all understand that implacable, external, groups are bent on the inauthentic interiorization of individuals and their natural/authentic ecologies. These groups are utilizing the ersatz notions of “individualism” to achieve this interiorization of authentic individuals. What may not be as apparent to my detractors is this is a necessary condition of a project that seeks to “assimilate” natural individuals into inauthentic groups. The task of authentic identity is to divide the authentic interior from the exterior. See my prior reification of “identity”. Any authentic identity _must_ be viewed by those exterior to it in objective terms. My use of the word “theory” is meant to elicit precisely this objectification of the authentic—but as objects no less authentic than a lion, tree, ocean or star. A “government that tests” a “social theory” is such an “object”. This not because I see governments as authentic but because we exist in a world where nature is divided by governments. Government interposes itself between Man and Nature just as surely as a theocracy interposes itself between Man and God. This is my response to your assertion: “Ours can and must be a political and not just religious struggle.” Sortocracy recognizes the inescapable political struggle as “government” as well as the inescapable struggle for authentic religious expression which, by necessity, is _externally_ viewed as “testing a theory”. Those living a “theory” are not required, nor even expected, to view it as a “theory”. It is, to them, authentic religion: Being. The political struggle is, then, a struggle for authentic religion, the attainment of which is freedom to Be. The sine qua non of the inauthentic exterior is the refusal of the ersatz “individuals” to accept separation from them by authentic individuals. The ersatz “individuals” hide behind authentic individuals who are confused by the ersatz “individualism” into self-alienation. When time comes kill the inauthentic, there must be a test that exposes the inauthentic “individual” so he may be killed without killing those merely suffering from self-alienation. Acceptance or rejection of Sortocracy is the best test that I’ve come up with. Come up with a better test or leave aside criticism of Sortocracy. 29
Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 05 Apr 2017 08:03 | # James: Empirical is to external as mystical is to internal OK, that has a satisfying internal relation, but mysticism as such would only be relevant to the higher reaches ... really, the last three stations on the right-hand side ... of the structure I reproduce in comment 26. While interesting in their own right, of course, and needful of mention, these three fail by way of their functional exclusivity as a focus of an enquiry into the general (and generally true) disposition of Mind and self and being, generality being the necessary precondition for an holistic, viable philosophical end-product. For it is philosophy, and not politics, for which we are in search. As regards empiricism and the experience of the external, that falls in the category of the ontic, and outside the terms of the project. Perhaps I am a coward, but I am happy for phenomenology and neurology to explore that realm, which is only technical in nature and not key to our concerns, which are ontological.
Five of the principal conflicts of modernity, certainly: Urbi et Orbi ... slaves contra Romans ... nobles contra plebs ... an homogenising Empire contra the tribal and local ... Christianity contra the gods. Unsure how key the Jewish struggle was otherwise. Any more? Probably, only our present-day modernist issues of techne, the unfettered will, and also the Money Power were completely absent. However, that is analysis, and it isn’t the focus of an ontological enquiry opening, one would hope, to original philosophy. This goes straight to the heart of my proposal for “Sortocracy” as “Sorting proponents of social theories into governments that test them.” Well, it may but an enquiry of this nature is not concerned for a downstream “app” like that, regardless of character and utility. The difference between an ontology that feeds, eventually, into a political expression and an analysis that also does so is the difference between a truth of life and the identification of a problem … the difference between a positive, renewing, freely-arising political generality and a particular solution arrived at by calculative thinking. Epochal change is a mechanical consequence of a motive mass of individual desires, and such desires, in the context of the modern political age, with all its untruths and pathologies, must emerge from our source, so to speak. The task of authentic identity is to divide the authentic interior from the exterior. Perhaps I would want to refine that along the lines of “The effect of the turn towards authenticity is an assortation in which that which does not belong to us falls away and that which does belong to us is disclosed.” Any authentic identity _must_ be viewed by those exterior to it in objective terms. That is what Heidegger’s Dasein implies. What follows in that paragraph is logical. But the emphasis on the place and effect of government takes us far beyond the immediate ontological task. As a rule, ontology looks first to the expresser, the originating agent, and does not venture very much upon his political method. Government, like constitutional law, is methodological. As such, it may be impositional, but it may also be an authentic focal point for identity’s destining: https://majorityrights.com/weblog/comments/awakening_monarchy_and_the_faith .. since Man is profoundly ethnic and relational, and has common interests which the individual can only serve through common means. Those living a “theory” are not required, nor even expected, to view it as a “theory”. It is, to them, authentic religion: Being. The political struggle is, then, a struggle for authentic religion, the attainment of which is freedom to Be. The “struggle” of ontology is to seek what is certain, true and permanent in and of us, and to banish “theory”, ie, ontology is predicated on being as reality. It is an absolutist position, admitting of no relativist implications. Faith, on the other hand, is the lingua franca of the exoteric circle and answers all questions only with itself. What faith itself is has value for ontology. What faiths are, or what dieties are, has none. Further, I would contend that ontology’s freedom is a particular quality in – not of – being. Certainly Heidegger considered freedom as a prior thing outside of being itself but becoming internalised in the estate of human presence. As we are not present for the vast majority of our waking lives, freedom weighs upon us as an object of great desire; but we can know it only in the degree to which we “are”. It’s a reward, not dissimilar to sexual pleasure. What is required in consideration of these things is to always cleave the life of the personality from that of “what is certain, true and permanent in and of us”. Without that discipline it is inevitable that words will lose their relational meanining, which is so central to what Heidegger called the essential thinking which distinguishes real ontology (and which you demonstrated in the aforementioned paragraph, but not so much in the one I quote next). The sine qua non of the inauthentic exterior is the refusal of the ersatz “individuals” to accept separation from them by authentic individuals. The ersatz “individuals” hide behind authentic individuals who are confused by the ersatz “individualism” into self-alienation. When time comes kill the inauthentic, there must be a test that exposes the inauthentic “individual” so he may be killed without killing those merely suffering from self-alienation. But we are all this “ersatz” entity. We all have a personality, and personality is always “ersatz”. And we can never be without personality. It is the product in us of Time and Place. It is filled with the countless ills of our Time and our Place, historically unique in their capacity to harm as they are. So we are all alienated. We are all inauthentic. The great political question, when we reach the stage of political questions, will be how to channel sufficient of our nature and truth and interest into the world, from which come all the millions of formative influences, great and small, so that a secure and vivifying life for our people and for each of us may be lived. But we are not there yet. Sortocracy, like Daniel’s rule-setting for homeostasis, is a cart before the ontological horse. Let us know ourselves. 30
Posted by DanielS on Wed, 05 Apr 2017 09:27 | # It will not be easy to abide by my agreed to word to try to be “nice” when the mere use of a word like “Cartesian” is considered an insult, but I will try, because there are, so to speak, what James would term theoretical insults going on in this conversation, which I should not just let go. As I recall, James once claimed that Locke was not relevant (it’s in the DNA nation article if you don’t believe me). That is not true. Locke was a heavily influence on Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence and most of the American Constitution. Locke’s empiricist philosophical concept of individual rights as opposed to group classification - “which he considered fictions of the mind” - is also a crucial matter from a point of view of racial systems defense. It also bears upon on the UN’s universal declaration of human rights. This is just one among scores of important issues that I’ve brought here, along with abstracts to rectify this, what can be called epistemological error - corrective tools to it such as: the Aritotlean matter of praxis - the characteristically agentive and reflexively responding social interactive world; its being biological nevertheless, of systemic nature, with organisms and their systems seeking optimal homeostasis; human nature as having second order cybernetic capacity to think about thinking - i.e. some agentive capacity to respond and manage systems as hermeneutic methodology affords both rigorous scientific inquiry and a step back to broader systemic and historical orientation - including to its interrelated interdependence and open endedness; thus, on the imaginative end, affording to the group and individual, coherence, accountability, agency and warrant in the governance of human ecologies. ...to name just a few things that I’ve discussed among the array of “utter failure” on my part, the GW ascribes and the “travesty” to individual freedom that James would try to attribute to me. James is apparently trying to slip past the issue of the critique of Locke now, central though it is, brushing the matter aside by calling Locke “stupid.” While GW has eagerly latched onto a misrepresentation of Locke and what was most crucial about what he was doing, as it served his Cartesian phobia the word, “social”, and the group unit of analysis. ..apparently wanting to go along with the Lockeatine line that these are mere “fictions of the mind:” What follows appears to me to be an instance of a Jewish troll slipping GW a mickey, knowing exactly how to pander to and feed misdirection to GW in his phobia to the kind of corrective that European peoples need given the Enlightenment/Cartesian model and Jewish manipulation thereof.
DanielS: Spiked is spiking the convesation here - the bit about “self authorship” is a preliminary diversion for GW to bemuse himself, it is an executive toy given to GW so that he can register his high i.q., while diverting him with its straw man paradigm - Pure (Cartesian) self-authorship or not. Spiked goes on to where he really wants to go (and there is reason to suspect that he is a Jewish troll doing this to GW), to slip the mickey to GW, to flatter his point of view with a misrepresentation of what Locke was doing:
DanielS: Thus Spike disingenuously puts Locke on “the social side”, knowing how to get GW to dismiss this pivotal critique. This misrepresentation was slipped to GW in order to keep him antagonistic to the key corrective of the Lockeatine epistemological error - a hermeneutic corrective to Locke’s “empirical” de-legitimization of social classification and discrimination thereupon in group defense - a relegitimization of which is crucial - absolutely centrally relevant - to our defense against “anti-racism”, whether through the auspices of Jews, liberals, Muslims, Christians, the scientistic, such as Locke, whomever. Contrary to what Spiked said, it is rather the case that that Locke presumed sheer empirical (non social) origin of perception, which rendered each individual sovereign as they were an equally valid judge as any of another social class(ification) - such as the Aristocracy, the social class with which he had a particular beef - with that, he was motivated to say that social classifications were not empirical, they were “fictions of the mind.” But here are even bigger clues that Spiked might be a Jewish troll specifically targeting GW’s predilections of anti-sociology and enjoyment, as GW does, of getting into (he hopes lost in) the nuances of critiquing Christianity:
DanielS: Hence, not only does Spike disingenuously put Locke on “the social side”, saying his was a “philosophy of social origin”, in order to get GW to dismiss this pivotal critique…but…when Spike says “the model arrived in Lockean and subsequent thought from Christianity’s model of Man as a soul seeking eternal life after” - Spike is suggesting that our western notion of individualism derived principally from Locke’s Christianity and not from his objectivist principle, which, rather, it did. And as Spike goes on to close his pitch, he merely repeats GW’s thinking back to him - a bit of neruolinguistic programming is being conducted in order to further pander to GW’s confirmation bias:
All that is merely repeating GW back to himself as an excipient sedative so that he and Bowery will take the mickey supporting their confirmation bias against the pivotal critique of Locke - which would otherwise set forth by contrast the legitimacy of the social unit of analysis, and the crucial need for its means and defense. That excipient sedative and mickey having been swallowed, GW goes on to say:
This is not just a ridiculous false dichotomy - it is to deny remedy of the White side’s largest contributing position to its own demise - a myopic focus on “objective truth” as oppose to that “relativistic Jewish sociology” - well, you should believe me when I tell you that Jews don’t want you to take your relative group interests into account. But rather than granting any consideration to what I say, GW and James hunker down in that singular perspective intransigently, as “the true European way” as “opposed to the way of all those Jewish sociology and humanities professors. They can’t play their language game with this true philosophy, free from impure sophistry, rhetoric and social influences!” But they do, as you are now witnessing, play games with the more empirical side as well; and a heavy empirical side focus would not preclude the necessity of the more complete world view that hermeneutics affords (GW tried to say that my view is not complete - he’s got it backwards, because hermeneutics allows, in fact insists upon, the more rigorous, empirical end as well - it does not encourage the Cartsian trap of being stuck on that side or the other (transcendence of empirical relevence) But there are patterns which are more than valid to classify in service of human ecology and accountability thereof - Lockeatine rights are insufficient to that end. To trivialize this issue is a vast disservice as it is largely at the heart of our problem with anti-racism and our ability to hold up against it. Mr. Spiked seems to have been trying to slip GW a Mickey there - knowing GW’s extreme prejudice against the social unit of analysis and the tools which might have passed through academia that might be applied to its consideration in rectification of social problems - and problems of individuality for that matter. Now, if GW were to say, “I want to spend time, quite often even, really focusing on and examining deeply the emergent” that would be fair enough, good - and I am sure that he would continue to yield some fine results (as Bowery has in his inquiries) which should be enough to satisfy his esteem as a significant contributor; to not have to denigrate the necessity of inquiry into broader social patterns as “not deep enough” - as if that’s true and as if I am competing with science as opposed to complementing it. We can say that GW and Bowery are looking into some harder rules, the hardest and closest to physical and biological causality they can find. It is not deterministic fate in humans that they are after, but they want to know determining factors in our nature, particularly as they hinge at the means of individual autonomy - thats what they’re after; and that’s fine. They are also are interested as to how that relative autonomy is co-evolved with adaptation to self correction (the natural selection of our own kind) against the machinations of social engineers (like YKW) working against our European kinds, and that’s fine too; up to the point where you exclude the idea that social rules - confirming of our individual and systemic biology and defending against social rules destructive to our systems - is a superfluous matter. That would rather be like expecting a human child to raise itself all alone on an island, expecting it to come back into society “well adapted”, if it could survive at all. To want as controlled an experiment as possible (taking into account some ethnical constraints on the control) to separate out social influences from the biological inheritance (which has social precedents in its make-up, by the way) is a valid inquiry, provided one doesn’t stay there, like a paranoid, consummate philosophical amateur, wanting to “start from the day zero” and hoping that by ignoring and destroying ideas which are at least as important as emergence, that you will devise all that is necessary for philosophy. Rather, you will be trolled in your delusion, have your punch bowl spiked by (((Spiked)))- among others who have in mind that my efforts should continue to be set aside, summarily dismissed and ignored. GW and Bowery burrow down to locate the biological constituents of the individual and their adaptiveness, their emergence, and I do think that is a commendable and necessary effort - as Bowery says, toward individual freedom; I commend that it is an invaluable aspect of the investigation into how a free individual acts in their interests - and in some regularity, ethnic genetic interests may correspond - but it is absurd to say that that will happen outside of the social as it is to say and expect a child to raise itself and turn out well adapted. And while I commend these efforts I recognize correctly that it is only one side, while the social side and my efforts are not being shown sufficient respect - in fact, no respect. GW says that my world view is not complete, but the reverse is true, the hermeneutic world view inquires of the more physical end and a closer reading of its nature as need be or desired, while also taking broad views as need be and desired. I.e., my world view comprehends his view, not the other way around. He is welcome to become a hermeneuticist, have his cake and eat it too - I wish he would. Recently he has said that he is “aggrieved” by my perspective, and where he has to to go through a grieving phase in order to come to terms with the death of bad ideas then so be it - the death throws have been unpleasant - telling me that I “have failed utterly.” No I haven’t; and recent conversations have demonstrated that he doesn’t know what I’m talking about when it comes to what I’ve contributed and its important differences from the academics and things he has aversion to. Nor for the fact that I respect his end of inquiry and can accommodate it within mine - that we can enhance one another’s efforts as such. I have lived, suffered and endured for the things that I say, saying them because they held up to alleviate my suffering and advance my personal cause and racial advocacy despite severe adversity. But thus far, even a recent conversation with GW showed that he really doesn’t understand the merit and difference of what I bring here - suggesting that “I merely wanted to apply things from academia”, he shows no understanding of my motives, nor of the important and original differences that I bring. He really indicates in this that he hasn’t gotten over the grudge that he’s carried from early days against “social academics” to where he wants to attribute his prejudice even where it is wholly inappropriate, to dismiss anything that reminds him of it as “useless”, “drive a truck over it”, “use a bunker buster bomb” and most tellingly of an amateur philosopher “To start from the day one” You will not find a more modernist and Cartesian notion than that, with all the attendant destruction (to EGI as well) that goes along with it. I use the word Cartesian in part to make Bowery mad, because it should not be viewed as an “insult” or an anti-White troll word - he should finally get used to the fact that I am not doing with that criticism what he wants to believe that I am doing with it - “criticizing science, truth and human freedom.” Hermeneutics allows for provisional Cartesian inquiries and structures, but recommends, recognizes, really, the necessity to step back and take broader historical context and open ended systemic concerns into account - it affords relief from becoming fixed in misapplication of Cartesian notions of coherence and necessity as they ill fit and ill serve the world of praxis - it is a liberation from mere faticity that allows for fuller coherence - for example on the social systemic and historical perspective which is so crucial to us. The social is simply a broader pattern - classification of groups are working hypothesis which may be tested. GW says that he wants to start from the day one. I say I’ve done my own version of that, tried it anyway - of necessity in a way, harrowing, utterly confusing communicological circumstance forced me to start from my own “day one”: After the real basics of pleasure and pain, of course, you start with: 1) Aesthetics - here are pretty colors, pretty food, there’s a pretty girl. 2) Then you find that’s not enough to get you past antagonism, people can be pretty nasty and disinterested, if not disrespectful of your aesthetic concerns; so you want to find friendly company, who appreciate your maturing sense of aesthetics, hopefully a pretty girl will come along with that - but that means negotiating more of the social/moral world than your mere instincts may have bargained for - not being sure where to turn in this task of learning a world view where people are more accepting of you and you can respect them as somewhat reliable - you look to the only historical precedent you know of - Christianity. Then you find that doesn’t work very well, you are being treated like an idiot by secular people (because you are an idiot); and unless you are so dishonest as to do a Matt’s Parrott and Heimbach, ever contriving ways to fool yourself and others that the golden rule and the rest of it is anything more than a Jewish trick (before you get to the JQ, you are inclined to write it off as bizarre and outmoded superstitions of tradition); and even if you could do a Parrott/Heimbach, you’d largely be contributing to the problem of not having a moral order defending a people other than Jews. The additional problem is that there is no other option to a moral order of consensus: toward that end GW and James types don’t help; and the YKW want them to continue in their obstruction - so you have the likes of “Spike.” Anyway, back to my journey from “the day one.” So, you don’t have a coherent moral order for your people, the selfish opportunities afforded by Lockeatine individualism or sheer, disingenuous objectivism have allowed the boomers to spend and destroy the social capital bequeathed them by implicit ethocentirism. 3) They tell you your problem is “psychological, its in you.” This is the stage where GW is stuck. My conjecture is that bad philosophy is born of his relatively good fortune - to turn Karl Jaspers on his head, when he said: “philosophy begins with foresakenness.” I have left psychological foundationalism behind as preponderant concern so long ago and with such good reason that it is infuriating to be obstructed with this. Back to my progression: you read psychology books, you look “inward” for the problem, you see a few “therapists.” It doesn’t really help, in fact, all it does is allow other people to blame you and say you are to blame and the people and society around you are simply a reality to which you must uncritically adjust. 4) Then you read an article called “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia” by Gregory Bateson et al. Low an behold! “Psychological problems” have been taken out of the head and into interaction - where they largely belong. And, thank whatever almighty forces, allow for social critique, as you know that there are social group forces operating against you; and none working for you and your group interests and that that is largely what ails you. 5) But why is it that other groups get to criticize society and other groups, but you don’t get to do that? Well, “because that would be ‘Leftist” and “Whites can’t be leftist” ... in their own interests... aha, actually, there is no White Left, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. So anyway, back to my journey from the day one. Now that psychological problems are out of your head and into interaction, including social interaction where the problems often occur, you behold the mushrooming field of communicology in the 1980s, doing all kinds of useful, true and important work with these very same premises. That some of it is misapplied against us goes without saying, and that is why I endeavored to deploy its understandings for our purposes…because the next thing I found in my journey from the day one, is that communicology, of necessity, claims the same turf as other disciplines - psychology, philosophy and yes, sociology, but also hermeneutics in its vast reach from history to biology and even physics. The choice of applications are myiad and are recommended to be shifted among as need be in a non-Cartesian process of inquiry. It just so happens that right up there with Jewish feminism’s anti White male position, I found the Jewish and liberal cause of anti racism to require communicological attention to the sociological, group unit of analysis and defense for White/European peoples. This hermeneutic inquiry is NOT in any way shape or from antagonistic or dismissive of biology, genetics and its emergent forms. On the contrary, inquiry as such is a crucial part of the hermeneutic circle for those concerned with the defense of our human ecologies - however, the focus on that end requires the attention of those with scientific training and predilection - a Bowery, a GW, a Kumiko, a Graham Lister. Kumiko and Lister manage a respect for my end and an understanding that I respect their end. But for some reason GW and James are having a harder time: My worst suspicion is that as boomers they derived the benefit of social capital bequeathed them through previous generation’s ethnocentrism, and spent it in opportunistic individualism - which is a liberalism that they might not want to acknowledge - whether having tarried at one time with Thatcher or Ron Paul - not having spent time in philosophy and other disciplines of the humanities, it might not be easy coming to terms with the fact that though objectivist philosophy served some of their generation well, it destroyed social capital, organization and accountability for subsequent generations - nor would they want “social accountability” when it is misrepresented to them as meaning service to outgroups or the free riding among their own. For whatever fortune they have, they want to believe they did it all by themselves, not that they had social capital to spend and that they spent it in such a way that has skunked subsequent generations. No, no - these are just “lefty social justice warriors”, so the Jews have told them - they didn’t get it right, the thing to do is double down in the objectivim which has served the boomers and others on top of the pyramid game, while allowing them to blind themselves to its destruction to our social group(s). I should not lump them together quite so, as Bowery does articulate this important idea of freedom of and from association; whereas GW seems to want to believe that it will invariable just happen if only we destroy all those Jewy language games and get back to the day one of nature. Not really knowing enough about “true philosophy” or socially responsible thought, they might not want to face the part that their “real philosophy” played all along to aid and abet this liberal destruction to our social group, our race, leaving us susceptible to those who would capitalize on this blind Cartesianism. Now a mess has been made of the world by the philosophy that has served GW and Bowery, at least in terms of some scientific prestige; but now that they have benefited from all social capital bequeathed to them of ethnocentrism of prior generations, they are conveniently disposed the ignore and disparage necessary corrective that generation Xers must undertake - to correct the damage to the social unit of analysis and its delegitimization - Now they want to kick back in their arm chair to tell us what “real philosophy is.” ...they will find their millennials in right wing internet bubbles, cute right wing girls who don’t want to be bothered with any of that social “whining”, especially not from rank and file White males who had been skunked by this right wing nonsense - sure, lets have an “alternative right” - we’ll get the right right this time ...Richard Spencer, Paul Gottfried and Frank Meyer said its the right thing to do - it must be true. Spike agrees too! See! They start from “the day one”, ignoring the social world and what learning that others have from testing and social experience; and what else is new? what else is to be expected of a generation so lucky as to be able to get away with being so self centered? They want to think that they got where they are sheerly by their “nature” and owe nobody nothing, not respect for their thoughts, not even when those thoughts might be better and more relevant than the clap trap this comment began with - no account to the social world which needs to know why the “real philosophy” accepted by prior generations fucked everything up so badly, and needs to know why that should (rather should not) be genuflected to when they propose nothing more than ramping up the same epistemological error - lets “re-boot the enlightenment.” No, no, we don’t understand, even though we lived it, endured it and found things that work by contrast, our ideas are “fake”, “socially derived” theirs are a pure reading of “nature.” With that bit of amateur nonsense posing as philosophy in our interests, its no wonder that the White race is in trouble.
That could only derive of the privileged conceits of boomer generation steeped in spent social capital bequeathed them of ethnocentrism, which allows them to kick back in their arm chairs and blind themselves to what is undeserving of intellectual respect. I have and tried (and failed) to be nice, but there is much that both of you do which is very good and important. The problem isn’t so much in what you attend to, it is in what you would ignore and falsely attribute. But that is correctable. For the moment I will suggest that there is no need to besmirch the social and as such reveal amateur philosophy of those who spent their lives in the social capital bequeathed them by ethnocentrism in order to opportunistically pursue their gain in the increasingly liberal world around them. I understand that both of you are more altruistic than that, but you tend to over estimate the extent to which pursuit of your individual concerns coincide with group interests and their salvation. ... but now lets get on with the “real philosophy”, never mind that it has left social destruction all around, we’ll egotistically block that fact and its correction. Perhaps worst of all, that I should have to walk into an institution and hear music from the group “Queen” ..please stop it.
“Rules” are not the only way to go about inquiry, but are a tool eminently appropriate and useful to certain inquiries; as such, it is ridiculous to consider the tool objectionable. The reason you attack and misrepresent the idea may have to do with misplaced jealousy (though you shouldn’t be, as you are doing enough things very well). Still, you seem to have a habit of attacking good, useful and important ideas. But rules are just a way of talking about consequential logics - which can be quite descriptive - i.e., describing aspects of the content of what we are so that we can be known to ourselves. Rules can describe what homeostasis there is (should, if you want to be descriptive). Rules are not merely prescriptive affectation. Though prescriptions of rules that would entail homeostatic correction might be possible; and should be welcomed, not objected to. At bottom, you are treating our concerns as a lineal ordering when in fact inquiry must be a back and forth circular process of correction of relevant facts and concerns - we simply can’t put off certain concerns and start from the day one, as if our only deep concerns reside in one line of inquiry. You can’t do science in every moment, you cannot continually investigate everything, you have to be able to take some things for granted as a working hypotheses - in other words, normally, in the world of praxis, you have to feel-things-out approximately (e.g., classify people according to our “prejudices”); while you can (and should) engage in scientific verification as well. Hermeneutics, as a corrective to the Cartesian anxiety (e.g., which can only trust science and scientific method to the point where it becomes over applied and scientistic), recognizes the necessity of an ongoing reciprocal process to engage in, correct, and integrate both ends in looking after human interests - individual and group systemic. Post a comment:
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Posted by DanielS on Tue, 22 Nov 2016 06:06 | #
Only in accordance with the Jewish red cape that you insist upon chasing.
White Left Nationalism (or any Left Nationalism) does not throw away the true nationalist candidate.
Nor is your essay’s whole premise correct - that the liberal axis is left - right.
Left nationalism is the antithesis of liberalism.
I would say “try again” but I am afraid that you will.